The first chapter of a three-part story...
Marianne and I had a long-standing cyclical friendship; we might not see one another for a few months. Eventually, though, she would always call on me for comfort and company. And invariably I would drive to her house to deliver it.
Marianne’s room reflected her undirected artistic endeavors. The walls had been painted turquoise some time ago. Pasted across them were half finished watercolors, scribbled chunks of poetry, and photographs of models from old magazines. When I would enter, I would see the bed directly diagonal from the doorway. There was a window on each of the adjacent walls. They admitted a skewed, faded sunlight in the afternoon. Natural light always appeared slightly grainy in there, like looking through worn cheesecloth.
Beside her bed was a nightstand perpetually littered with the remains of daily routine: an ashtray two-thirds full with cigarette butts and the blackened wood of burned matches, a stray discarded tissue, a bottle of cold-relief pills. Night-time formula. From time to time, ticket stubs from local shows at dive-bar venues would find themselves stacked lovingly in a corner with the hope for future nostalgia. They would pile, only to be swept into the trash a few months later.
The only indication of real care or retained interest was a green pencil case that always ornamented the tabletop. In it were the pens and pencils, stencils and smudgers that would spawn sketches and page-long strings of words that related to one another only in her mind. All were to be deposited in hordes of notebooks to be seen only by her and a few privileged friends. I felt lucky to be among this set. The work was inspired, of genius quality. It lacked just one element: direction.
Oftentimes Marianne would have some of her notebooks strewn like leaves on her bed. On this occasion, I found her poring over several volumes from the year before. A half-finished bottle of cheap chardonnay stood at attention on the floor beside her. I sensed from experience that these facts in tandem were a bad sign, but when she glanced up and saw me, her crystal blue eyes widened and a wily, happy grin spread across her face.
“Emmitt!” she cooed ecstatically.
I closed the door and walked over to the bed, leaning over to hug her. “Don’t get up,” I said, and sat on the edge beside her.
“I wasn’t going to,” she replied.
“You knew I’d come over to you.”
“That’s how you are.”
I nodded, appreciating her remark, then picked up one of the stray journals. Occasionally she would ask me to read passages aloud to her. It was difficult but fun to try and match my voice to her words, to discover the emphases and pauses as I searched through them for the first time. She didn’t ask me to read today, though, and after a minute of silence wherein both of us glared darkly at the writing in front of us, I put my volume down.
“How’ve you been?”
“I’m already drunk. What time is it?” She squinted at the alarm clock on the other side of the room. “Almost six o’clock!” She leaned over me, pulled the wine from the ground, and took a swig. Her wavy red hair fell back against her shoulders as her neck distended to imbibe the alcohol. She handed it to me. I took a couple of swigs as she said, “He called me last week. All the feelings came back.”
“Who?”
“Mark! Mark, that lusty interloper. He said he was ready to love again.”
Mark lived outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the heart of Amish country – a five-hour trip from our southern Connecticut lives. Consequently I’d never met him. Marianne had told me all about him, though; their relationship as she perceived it, and why they had split up. She’d shown me pictures. He was a tired-looking mid-twenties guy, a pasty man with short black facial hair and dark eyes. All of this detail failed to coalesce into the emotional fervor I wanted to feel over this conversational development. It was her world, not ours. All I could do was observe it.
“That’s good, then, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s the fault line of an earthquake. He shakes the world with his empty space.” She grabbed the wine back from me. I picked up another notebook, rifled through, and stopped on a worn page that featured a blurred black-and-white profile of Marianne with one eyebrow raised, looking cynically amused. The photograph was pasted beside a jumble of scrawled partial thoughts that began, “My reflection does not believe in your actuality.” I glanced back up between scanning the page.
“So, something happened?”
“He ruined me. It’s his problem this time, not mine.”
“I thought you said he was ready to love you again.”
She threw her arms up. “He said he was ready. He never knew what he wanted. Like an earthquake.”
“All right. What happened, then?” I took the wine from her, finishing it in one long gulp.
“He called me last week, and everything was grand as a piano. I was supposed to meet him at the train station today. I got my mom to pay for it, even after she complained. ‘It’s okay,’ I told her. ‘It’s for true love this time.’ She couldn’t stop me after that. You can’t stop love. You know what true love is, don’t you Emmitt?”
I smiled, then frowned at the weight of subsequent memory. “Yes, I know what it is.”
“It’s non-recyclable plastic!” she cried, her voice bouncing off the walls in hollowed assertion. “It’s gone, gone for good now. I can’t get hold of him.” Her eyes sparkled in blue flame.
I tilted my head imploringly. “He won’t answer his phone?”
“I tried. What does he want from me? Every hour for the past two days.” She held up two long, nail-bitten fingers. Spatters of chipped polish tinted the tips a deep violet. “Even in the middle of the night. It was a trick.” She met my eyes gravely with her own. “To drive me crazy.”
I decided not to pursue this line of thought further.
“You know where he lives. Why don’t you show up at his doorstep and give him a good thrashing?”
She stared down at the green comforter wrapped around her legs. “I just can’t. We don’t work like that.” This was her way of saying that she was too afraid, of telling me her true feelings without being overtly sincere. I scrunched my forehead in contemplation.
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Get more drunk.” She smiled again, though pain glistened at the edges of her lips. “Do you want to do some karaoke tonight?”
“If that’s what you want,” I said, “then you know I’m up for it.”
Karaoke had been a tradition between us since we’d both been old enough to drink legally. It was available on any given night at a nearby bar. We had come to know the owner, Ken DeNiro, and much of the staff by name. We would coax each other into going, pick songs for one another to sing, and make asses of ourselves without concern for the aesthetic opinions of our audience. It was exciting, blood-boiling to be under the bluish spotlight, above and in front of tipsy, personable spectators. They couldn’t laugh at your lack of skill for fear that you might respond in kind afterward. I was always willing to go. It was enough to be up on that stage for a few minutes.
Marianne’s smile widened. “Kick-ass. Let’s find something to drink in this place before my mother gets home.” With a flourish of her hands she bounced up lightly off the bed, kicking to let the legs of her checkered blue pajama pants down, and straightening her green tank-top. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and I could tell. But I could also tell that she didn’t care if the vague outline of her nipples was obvious. It was a nonchalant suggestive gesture, to hold me in suspense without the slightest intention of acquiescence.
We went into her kitchen. The blinds had been pulled on the windows, and trees obscured what little light might have come in from the outside. A lonely lamp affixed to the wall above the kitchen table gave what orangey illumination it could muster. While Marianne set to work searching through the cabinetry, I sat on a wooden chair under the dusky light. A small stack of newspapers and magazines was heaped in one corner. I flipped through the headlines.
“Get this one,” I said, stopping on a chance page. “Senate Candidates Fight Perception.”
“Perception of what?” she called from where she was, head buried deep in cereal boxes and cooking oils.
“I don’t want to know,” I replied. “It’s funnier to me if they’re fighting perception in general.”
“Isn’t that two-thirds of their job anyway?”
I continued perusing, and presently she appeared beside me with two bottles – a pinot grigio, and a recently opened bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “These will do for now, don’t you think?”
I looked up at her. “Wine’s pretty popular ‘round here, huh?”
“Oh, don’t underestimate the wine,” she mocked. “It’ll get you where you’re going without you even knowing.” She sauntered over to the sink and grabbed two large, plastic cups.
“That’s the thing. I like to know I’m there,” I retorted.
Marianne crouched down, getting very close, until I could see the tiny lines that fanned from the corners of her eyes. “Don’t underestimate the wine,” she repeated. I smelled the drug on her tongue, promoting itself through her. It was sweet and sterile. She shoved one of the cups into my hand.
“Look at this,” she went on, sliding one of the fashion magazines in front of me. She drew it open at a few randomly chosen pages, finally stopping and pointing at a brunette model, coquettishly teasing the second button of a black Theory shirt. The woman was standing, legs apart, and leaning comfortably to one side so that her hip was more defined.
“Clarisse is not happy, Emmitt.”
“She looks pretty happy to me.” I snuck a look back at the page. A smile graced the model’s face, as I’d suspected.
“No, she’s not. I’ll tell you why.” As if there was no more to the discussion, Marianne leaped from her chair and galloped barefoot back to her room. She emerged seconds later with a small, fat book. She dumped it on top of the magazine with an already chosen page on display.
In the photograph before me, a young Japanese girl sat on a concrete step. She was clad in a bright pink two-piece dress, with pink stockings and pink shoes. Her long black hair was smoothed and tied back in three places with pink ribbon. She was holding a small pastel yellow parasol. The text next to her stated that she was thirteen years old. The girl wasn’t smiling.
“Yumi’s happier,” Marianne stated defiantly.
“Why’s that?”
“Clarisse has to wear and do what other people tell her to. Yumi does not.”
“But Yumi’s not smiling.”
Marianne lit a cigarette over me and took a drag. “Of course not. Being thirteen sucks for everybody.” Shutting both books with a smack! she walked off again. “I have juice in my room. C’mon.”
*******************
Marianne and I had a long-standing cyclical friendship; we might not see one another for a few months. Eventually, though, she would always call on me for comfort and company. And invariably I would drive to her house to deliver it.
Marianne’s room reflected her undirected artistic endeavors. The walls had been painted turquoise some time ago. Pasted across them were half finished watercolors, scribbled chunks of poetry, and photographs of models from old magazines. When I would enter, I would see the bed directly diagonal from the doorway. There was a window on each of the adjacent walls. They admitted a skewed, faded sunlight in the afternoon. Natural light always appeared slightly grainy in there, like looking through worn cheesecloth.
Beside her bed was a nightstand perpetually littered with the remains of daily routine: an ashtray two-thirds full with cigarette butts and the blackened wood of burned matches, a stray discarded tissue, a bottle of cold-relief pills. Night-time formula. From time to time, ticket stubs from local shows at dive-bar venues would find themselves stacked lovingly in a corner with the hope for future nostalgia. They would pile, only to be swept into the trash a few months later.
The only indication of real care or retained interest was a green pencil case that always ornamented the tabletop. In it were the pens and pencils, stencils and smudgers that would spawn sketches and page-long strings of words that related to one another only in her mind. All were to be deposited in hordes of notebooks to be seen only by her and a few privileged friends. I felt lucky to be among this set. The work was inspired, of genius quality. It lacked just one element: direction.
Oftentimes Marianne would have some of her notebooks strewn like leaves on her bed. On this occasion, I found her poring over several volumes from the year before. A half-finished bottle of cheap chardonnay stood at attention on the floor beside her. I sensed from experience that these facts in tandem were a bad sign, but when she glanced up and saw me, her crystal blue eyes widened and a wily, happy grin spread across her face.
“Emmitt!” she cooed ecstatically.
I closed the door and walked over to the bed, leaning over to hug her. “Don’t get up,” I said, and sat on the edge beside her.
“I wasn’t going to,” she replied.
“You knew I’d come over to you.”
“That’s how you are.”
I nodded, appreciating her remark, then picked up one of the stray journals. Occasionally she would ask me to read passages aloud to her. It was difficult but fun to try and match my voice to her words, to discover the emphases and pauses as I searched through them for the first time. She didn’t ask me to read today, though, and after a minute of silence wherein both of us glared darkly at the writing in front of us, I put my volume down.
“How’ve you been?”
“I’m already drunk. What time is it?” She squinted at the alarm clock on the other side of the room. “Almost six o’clock!” She leaned over me, pulled the wine from the ground, and took a swig. Her wavy red hair fell back against her shoulders as her neck distended to imbibe the alcohol. She handed it to me. I took a couple of swigs as she said, “He called me last week. All the feelings came back.”
“Who?”
“Mark! Mark, that lusty interloper. He said he was ready to love again.”
Mark lived outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the heart of Amish country – a five-hour trip from our southern Connecticut lives. Consequently I’d never met him. Marianne had told me all about him, though; their relationship as she perceived it, and why they had split up. She’d shown me pictures. He was a tired-looking mid-twenties guy, a pasty man with short black facial hair and dark eyes. All of this detail failed to coalesce into the emotional fervor I wanted to feel over this conversational development. It was her world, not ours. All I could do was observe it.
“That’s good, then, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s the fault line of an earthquake. He shakes the world with his empty space.” She grabbed the wine back from me. I picked up another notebook, rifled through, and stopped on a worn page that featured a blurred black-and-white profile of Marianne with one eyebrow raised, looking cynically amused. The photograph was pasted beside a jumble of scrawled partial thoughts that began, “My reflection does not believe in your actuality.” I glanced back up between scanning the page.
“So, something happened?”
“He ruined me. It’s his problem this time, not mine.”
“I thought you said he was ready to love you again.”
She threw her arms up. “He said he was ready. He never knew what he wanted. Like an earthquake.”
“All right. What happened, then?” I took the wine from her, finishing it in one long gulp.
“He called me last week, and everything was grand as a piano. I was supposed to meet him at the train station today. I got my mom to pay for it, even after she complained. ‘It’s okay,’ I told her. ‘It’s for true love this time.’ She couldn’t stop me after that. You can’t stop love. You know what true love is, don’t you Emmitt?”
I smiled, then frowned at the weight of subsequent memory. “Yes, I know what it is.”
“It’s non-recyclable plastic!” she cried, her voice bouncing off the walls in hollowed assertion. “It’s gone, gone for good now. I can’t get hold of him.” Her eyes sparkled in blue flame.
I tilted my head imploringly. “He won’t answer his phone?”
“I tried. What does he want from me? Every hour for the past two days.” She held up two long, nail-bitten fingers. Spatters of chipped polish tinted the tips a deep violet. “Even in the middle of the night. It was a trick.” She met my eyes gravely with her own. “To drive me crazy.”
I decided not to pursue this line of thought further.
“You know where he lives. Why don’t you show up at his doorstep and give him a good thrashing?”
She stared down at the green comforter wrapped around her legs. “I just can’t. We don’t work like that.” This was her way of saying that she was too afraid, of telling me her true feelings without being overtly sincere. I scrunched my forehead in contemplation.
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Get more drunk.” She smiled again, though pain glistened at the edges of her lips. “Do you want to do some karaoke tonight?”
“If that’s what you want,” I said, “then you know I’m up for it.”
Karaoke had been a tradition between us since we’d both been old enough to drink legally. It was available on any given night at a nearby bar. We had come to know the owner, Ken DeNiro, and much of the staff by name. We would coax each other into going, pick songs for one another to sing, and make asses of ourselves without concern for the aesthetic opinions of our audience. It was exciting, blood-boiling to be under the bluish spotlight, above and in front of tipsy, personable spectators. They couldn’t laugh at your lack of skill for fear that you might respond in kind afterward. I was always willing to go. It was enough to be up on that stage for a few minutes.
Marianne’s smile widened. “Kick-ass. Let’s find something to drink in this place before my mother gets home.” With a flourish of her hands she bounced up lightly off the bed, kicking to let the legs of her checkered blue pajama pants down, and straightening her green tank-top. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and I could tell. But I could also tell that she didn’t care if the vague outline of her nipples was obvious. It was a nonchalant suggestive gesture, to hold me in suspense without the slightest intention of acquiescence.
We went into her kitchen. The blinds had been pulled on the windows, and trees obscured what little light might have come in from the outside. A lonely lamp affixed to the wall above the kitchen table gave what orangey illumination it could muster. While Marianne set to work searching through the cabinetry, I sat on a wooden chair under the dusky light. A small stack of newspapers and magazines was heaped in one corner. I flipped through the headlines.
“Get this one,” I said, stopping on a chance page. “Senate Candidates Fight Perception.”
“Perception of what?” she called from where she was, head buried deep in cereal boxes and cooking oils.
“I don’t want to know,” I replied. “It’s funnier to me if they’re fighting perception in general.”
“Isn’t that two-thirds of their job anyway?”
I continued perusing, and presently she appeared beside me with two bottles – a pinot grigio, and a recently opened bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “These will do for now, don’t you think?”
I looked up at her. “Wine’s pretty popular ‘round here, huh?”
“Oh, don’t underestimate the wine,” she mocked. “It’ll get you where you’re going without you even knowing.” She sauntered over to the sink and grabbed two large, plastic cups.
“That’s the thing. I like to know I’m there,” I retorted.
Marianne crouched down, getting very close, until I could see the tiny lines that fanned from the corners of her eyes. “Don’t underestimate the wine,” she repeated. I smelled the drug on her tongue, promoting itself through her. It was sweet and sterile. She shoved one of the cups into my hand.
“Look at this,” she went on, sliding one of the fashion magazines in front of me. She drew it open at a few randomly chosen pages, finally stopping and pointing at a brunette model, coquettishly teasing the second button of a black Theory shirt. The woman was standing, legs apart, and leaning comfortably to one side so that her hip was more defined.
“Clarisse is not happy, Emmitt.”
“She looks pretty happy to me.” I snuck a look back at the page. A smile graced the model’s face, as I’d suspected.
“No, she’s not. I’ll tell you why.” As if there was no more to the discussion, Marianne leaped from her chair and galloped barefoot back to her room. She emerged seconds later with a small, fat book. She dumped it on top of the magazine with an already chosen page on display.
In the photograph before me, a young Japanese girl sat on a concrete step. She was clad in a bright pink two-piece dress, with pink stockings and pink shoes. Her long black hair was smoothed and tied back in three places with pink ribbon. She was holding a small pastel yellow parasol. The text next to her stated that she was thirteen years old. The girl wasn’t smiling.
“Yumi’s happier,” Marianne stated defiantly.
“Why’s that?”
“Clarisse has to wear and do what other people tell her to. Yumi does not.”
“But Yumi’s not smiling.”
Marianne lit a cigarette over me and took a drag. “Of course not. Being thirteen sucks for everybody.” Shutting both books with a smack! she walked off again. “I have juice in my room. C’mon.”
*******************
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